(053/18) Santa Prassede all'Esquilino Interior of Santa Prassede Santa Prassede is a a 9th century minor basilica located near the major basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in the rione Esquilino. The dedication is to St Praxedes. The patron saint of this church is one of those at Rome, the biographies of whom are now completely lost. The revised Roman martyrology now simply lists her as the person to whom the church is dedicated. A romantic legend of the 6th century, which may possibly preserve the names of real people, describes St Pudens as a Roman senator who gave hospitality to St Peter. He had two virgin daughters who were martyred, Sts. Pudentiana and Praxedis; the former has the nearby church of Santa Pudenziana dedicated to her. Santa Prassede used this church to hide the Christians persecuted by the then Emperor Antoninus Pius, providing for the burial of the martyrs at the Priscilla Cemetery, the catacombs of Santa Priscilla on the Via Salaria. In this Cemetery, Santa Prassede herself was buried with her sister and then returned to her church rebuilt by Pasquale I. [1] [2] The existence of the martyr daughters is historically extremely problematic. Pudens himself has been deleted from the revised Roman martyrology. The most recent scholarly consensus on who Praxedis really was, concludes that she was probably a lady who donated property for the foundation of the original church, or money for the purpose. [1] [a] History The Basilica of Santa Prassede stands on the ancient Clivus Suburanus, not far from Santa Maria Maggiore. This church is the most complete monument of the Carolingian Renaissance, when the papacy aspired to revive the glories of Canstantine's Christian empire. The first church here was probably built in the time of Pope St Siricius (384-399) and was one of the tituli, the first parish churches of Rome, known as Titulus Praxedis. [1] [g] [h] (053/18) The first definite mention of the forerunner of the present church is an epitaph dated 489, in which a Presbyter Tituli Praxedis is mentioned. This was found in the catacombs of St Hippolytus, near San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. [1] [c] Pope Adrian I (772-95) is described in the Liber Pontificalis as having restored this original church in integro, indicating that it had fallen into a bad state of repair. Pope Leo III (802-6) donated several valuable liturgical items. [1] Pope St Paschal I (817-24) abandoned the old church because it was in ruins, and built a new one on a terrace levelled on a slope of the Esquiline Hill in the year that he was elected. He planned Santa Prassede as small-scale copy of the Constantinian basilica of St Peter’s in the Vatican, complete with an internal courtyard between the main entrance and the internal façade. This is essentially the building that we have, although there have been several major architectural interventions since. The plan was as a T-shaped basilica. The nave and two side aisles were separated by twenty-two columns. The columns are all ancient, a matching set of grey granite from Mons Claudianus, a Roman quarry in the eastern desert of Egypt. The nave and aisle terminated in a triumphal arch. [1] [3] [5] [c] [h] It is Pascale who orchestrated the last great translation of the relics of martyrs from the cemeteries outside of the walls of Rome. He also moved the body of Pope Celestino I from the Catacombs of Priscilla to Santa Prassede. Part of the function of the new church was to serve as a repository for relics of martyrs from the catacombs. At the beginning of the 9th century, the government of the city of Rome had lost control of its surrounding countryside to gangs of marauders, and the safety of pilgrims could no longer be guaranteed. As a result, the Church undertook a campaign to collect the relics of martyrs being venerated, and to re-enshrine them in churches within the city walls. All the catacombs except those at San Sebastiano fuori le Mura were then abandoned, and their locations forgotten. The new shrine churches usually displayed the feature of a mock catacomb under the high altar, typically a semi-circular confessio (a sort of crypt) accessed by stairs from either end of the transept. The confessio was either genuinely underground, or was under the raised floor of the sanctuary. [1] [h] The church was given another function by the pope; he attached the unique funerary chapel of St Zeno to the right hand side wall, to serve as a memorial for his mother. At this period side chapels in churches were still not the norm, as it was usual to build a separate church or chapel if one wanted to for a specific purpose. [1] The pope also founded a monastery next to the church, and staffed it with some of the Byzantine- rite Greek monks who had arrived in Rome in numbers in the previous century as refugees from the Iconoclast policy in the Byzantine Empire. [1] The mosaics commissioned for this church by Pope Paschal are deservedly famous. However, the surveying during the construction was seriously badly done. The nave walls and colonnades are not parallel, neither are they straight. The transept is not at right angles to the nave's major axis, and neither are the façade and the atrium. This left the structure compromised. The clearest sign of this is at the top of the mosaic on the triumphal arch, there is a sag between the wall and the ceiling. [1] Middle ages The presence of Byzantine rite monks at Rome faded away towards the end of the 9th century. Benedictine monks were probably here by the early 10th century, because they became dominant in Roman monasticism then. Pope Innocent III assigned the complex in 1198 to the reformed Benedictine congregation based at the abbey of Vallombrosa. The Vallumbrosans had been founded by St John Gualbert in 1073. The monastery here became one of their more important ones, and has survived as a functioning monastic community to the present day. [1] [e] When the monks took charge, they had to instigate a major renovation because the fabric of the basilica was becoming unstable owing to the surveying quirks already mentioned. To consolidate the structure, three transverse arches were inserted into the nave which were supported by six massive (053/18) piers enclosing ancient columns. Also, most of the original windows were blocked up, although it is difficult to ascertain when this happened because of the activities of later restorers. [1] [e] In 1118 the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, in order to enforce the privilege of investiture, had Frangipane supporters burst into Santa Prassede while Pope Gelasius II is celebrating mass. The Pope, thanks to the help of the people, manages to escape on horseback and in the night fled to Gaeta. [3] In the late 13th century a squat tower campanile was perched on top of the left hand end of the transept, and a little later the right hand end of the transept was walled off to create a chapel dedicated to All Saints. [e] Around the same time, in the reign of Pope Nicholas IV (1288-2), the relics of St Valentine were brought from his shrine on the Via Flaminia and enshrined in the Chapel of the Pillar. The reason why this church was chosen for the honor was that the St Zeno of the chapel next door featured in his fictional legend. [1] Later restorations The beginning of a series of major re-orderings of the church was in 1489, when Cardinal Antonio Pallavicini Gentili commenced a five-year project to enclose the sanctuary. The arcades just mentioned were blocked, and small elevated choirs for the monks were inserted on each side. The arrangement was possible because the apse intruded into the monastic range to the north, and the monks could enter from the second storey of their monastery. [1] [3] In 1564 St Charles Borromeo, the saintly archbishop of Milan, was made the titular. He took a strong personal interest in the church, and it is on record that he used to spend a whole night in prayer in the confessio when on visits to Rome. Also he used to keep a set of rooms in the monastery as his lodgings, and distributed alms to poor people in the former atrium, now the courtyard. The table that he used is preserved as a relic in the church. [1] After his appointment as cardinal he appointed Mar$no Longhi the Elder as architect for his interventions in the church, which were under way in 1575. The work involved: remodelling the entrance staircase from the main entrance to the courtyard; re-facing the façade; opening eight large windows in the upper nave walls; vaulting the side aisles, and building a new sacristy. Most unfortunately, he inserted two little balconies in front of reliquary cupboards on either side of the triumphal arch, destroying parts of the ancient mosaic in the process. These balconies or poggioli were for the display of saints' relics on their feast-days. The other work done by Longhi in the sanctuary was destroyed in later restorations. The main project was finished in 1584, and also involved the rebuilding of the monastery to the north. [1] [3] [e] Ten years after this, Cardinal Alessandro de' Medici became titular cardinal here (1594-1600) and commissioned the complete decoration of the central nave, with the stories of the Passion, from a group of late mannerist painters.